146 <. ' '" \,.... ,-" j, have had recourse. A descendant of his-inconsistently described by Mr. Grosslnan first as Alexander's moth- er's cousin but later as her father- came to be known as "the Nero of the Ardatovsky district." He had a band- Inaster of his household put to death when the man had been sent a note by one of his actress mistresses, and he was known for his "uncontrolled propen- SIty to outbursts of cruel anger." On one occasion, when he had COlne to believe that the steward of hIs estate had been cheating hÍtn, he pun- ished him in a hideous way. The Inan, who had "been living very d 1 " d " . f ecen t y an was creatIng or hÍtnself a respectahle situation," had Inade a point of sending his son to school in Moscow. "The boy had just COlne hOlne on vacation, and he was Inade a vIctÍtn of I van Dlnitrie- vich, who subjected him to a very cruel lashing in the presence of his parents" because the Inaster knew "that they adored hitn, and that the suffering thus itnposed on theln was Inore painful than any punishment that he Inight have contrived for them- selves." The mother of Alexander loved poetry and novels-"especially tragedy." She liked to be fashionably dressed, says one of her daughters, "danced relnarkably well, loved the theatre, and never mIssed a chance to dance or engage a box." As a young girl, she had liked to ride and to hunt with a rifle; in her old age, she slnoked cigars and read Schelling in French translation She intilnidated her serv- ants by cuffing them. In all this history of the Sukhovo-Kobylin falnily one is Inade a ware in what seelns to us a rather shocking way of the discrepancy between the barbaric life that these landowners were able to lead at the saIne titne that they were cultivating, as Alexander and his Inother did, the flowers of Western thought and art. When a distinguished young profes- _ sor, under whom Alexander had sat at < the Moscow University, was brought into the Sukhovo-Kobylin household as a tutor for his sister and he and the sister fell In love, the snobbish Sukhovo- Kobylins regarded the infatuation as an insolent threat by the tutor, and Alex- ander, in one of his rages, declared he would kill the young Inan if the mat- ter went any further. The people who knew Alexander, according to Mr. Grosslnan, had adlnired him but not much liked him, and they believed he had murdered his mistress. Some blood- stains were found on a wall of hIS apartment, and there were spatterings of blood on the back stairs, which Don't go to the Orient on Pan Am or Japan Air Lines or1WA orVarig or Philippine Airlines or Canadian Pacific Air or Northwest Orient Airlines... ...without the 1972 Cathay Pacific Airways book of Orient Discovery Tours. Big-hearted? No - just realistic. You see, Cathay Pacific can't get you there from here. So we leave that to our friends the transpacific carriers. But once in the Orient, you're ours. So we go all out to tempt you with our tempting book of Orient vacation ideas. 64 tours and de-tours from " '4 , plain to fancy. '. From the folks who know the far East like a book. . . a book. \C.J\Jf cat haV ot tÞe {.)ffI.# ,: '!! ,,' , *' -;/' ' ' /-" ,,- "'-t\ \. "100- -)'-<" M ":; < .qJ'-" , ,/' '-' "1 -:: ø-<s., '- -..: :'/ , ,.: zr: . ; ..<;$ v< ,'j? i!: , "- ' v ' < ..... 4"J 't ,\ - .. , \ - ""'$ ' ,!I!i<-- '?, .. I (k" ------------- ,$< . : Free! : Yes. Tempt me, with your big Idea book. Name Addres s City State My travel agent I S Cathay Pacific Airways - Dept. NY -C-3 /72 291 Geary St , San Francisco, CA 94102 The airline to fly in the Orient after you fly to the Orient. ,_ " v-- 0> Zip ---------------------------- had been itnperfectly rubbed a way, and Kobylin could not satisfactorily explain these on the grounds that an aunt, who had lived in the rooms, had once ap- plied leeches to her daughters; that his valet had had a nosebleed; and that the cooks had been killing poultry. His alibi at the time of the murder-he c]ailned to have been elsewhere at a party-seemed to depend on unsatis- factory evidence. Then Mlle. Di- manche's cook deposed that to force him to confess to the crimé he had been itnprisoned in a "secret " h I if d ". room, were 1e su ere In- hUlnan tortures," administered bv the police-horrible beatings and hangIngs on a hook-while he was deprived of anything to drInk and given nothing but salt herring to eat. In 1936, however, another writer nalned Grosslnan-in this case Vik- tor-published a book called "The Case of Sukhovo-Kobylin," in which he tried to refute the other Grosslnan. He prints side by side the two versions of the Inurder, and neither of them is con- vincing. If Kobylin was the culprit, why was it necessary for hiln to strug- gle with his Inistress so brutally and to cut her throat with a candlestick? Can one redlly cut a throat with a candle- stick? And why did he have Louise's picture hanging over his bed all the rest of his life and visit her grave every year? Leonid Grosslnan bebeves that, his theatrical instincts being highly de- veloped, his grief was all acting But why did he and Naryshkina nalne their illegititnate daughter Louise Ditnanche? Leonid Grossman calls attention to Kobylin's looking forward longingly to the tÍtne "when the Lord God will allow my sinful soul to find peace in Iny blessed penitence [lyubeznoe poka- yanzeJ." "Penitence for what?" asks Grosslnan. But not even this is definite evidence, for Kobylin Inay be speak- ing silnply of his wasted years of dis- sipation. One cannot tell what actually happened. It is one of those Russian puzzles that never get properly solved. The Russians, with their vagueness about actual events and their ready itnaginations, perhaps prefer to have them like this. Is it true that thé Czar Alexander I had not died when he was supposed to have died but arranged for hilnself a false funeral and stole a way to the East, where he lived as a holy Inan for Inore than a quarter of a cen- tury and was twice recognized by peo- ple who knew hÍtn? When, sometilne in the late eighties, his tOln b was opened, it was said to have been found empty, and the Comlnunists, when they opened it later, reported that It con-